Category: Professional Development
Advertisements Conferences, especially when we get back to in-person, are exciting spaces. You’ll meet hundreds, even thousands of people who are passionate about the same things you are. When teachers get together at a conference such as the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention, or any number of other teacher conferences, the energy […]
Advertisements Since I co-authored a number of articles and chapters in the early 2000s–including the most popular “Why Revitalize Grammar?” (2003, English Journal), “Grammar Rant Analysis” (2006, English Journal), and Grammar Rants (Heinemann, 2011)–I have been exploring the ways in which grammar instruction in the USA is based on bigotry. In the years since, I […]
Advertisements In a democracy, the real goal of education is to help students develop themselves into knowledgeable, critically thoughtful, and action-oriented citizens. That means it is our job as teachers to educate our students to live their best futures for themselves and those around them. Good teachers know that we don’t have all the answers […]
Advertisements Traditional colleges/universities are conservative, even risk-averse institutions desperately preserving their prestige (and market share). The open market of for-profit education is a risk-fueled financial orgy desperately trying to be taken seriously. Both have ethical and organizational problems, which is why neither is succeeding in truly innovating the practices of higher education. What real innovation […]
Advertisements I love social media. Not all of it. I’ve been off Facebook for just about a year, and I have enjoyed the time away. But I love Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. I like these platforms better because they are more public facing than Facebook, which tends to narrow to people I know personally. I […]
Advertisements This week, for our last class session, I asked students in my Teaching of Writing class what questions they have about teaching writing in high school/middle school. I also allowed questions about teaching in general. The students were able to upload questions anonymously using a Google Form I created for them. I’m always interested […]
Advertisements I have been using Twitter for over 9 years now (@Klind2013) and while I originally used it similarly to how I used Facebook, I now use it almost entirely to speak with professional colleagues. I still somewhat begrudgingly use FB to communicate with relatives, friends, old schoolmates, and some colleagues, but Twitter has become […]
Advertisements Two years ago I taught a course for first-year college students that was focused on social media. It was called, “The Language of Social Justice,” and we looked at how social justice was fought for and against on social media. I required all the students to sign up for some social media, including Twitter, […]
Advertisements In Fall 2018, I designed a new course I called “Reading Social Media,” which is intended to explore the ways in which social media shapes and reshapes public discourse and those who engage in it. The course was taught in a fully-online environment, meaning that the students and I never met in person. We […]
Advertisements I always enjoy the annual conventions of the National Council of Teachers of English. I’ve been attending them since 1991, give or take a couple I may have missed. This year’s NCTE Convention was especially meaningful for a few reasons. I wanted to take some time to reflect on what I’ve observed and […]